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JMP
33,6
406
Received 23 January 2018
Revised 15 April 2018
8 August 2018
Accepted 28 August 2018
Journal of Managerial Psychology
Vol. 33 No. 6, 2018
pp. 406-417
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0268-3946
DOI 10.1108/JMP-12-2017-0435
Servant leadership and
engagement: a dual
mediation model
Yuanjie Bao and Chaoping Li
School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University of China,
Beijing, China, and
Hao Zhao
Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, USA
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare two mediating mechanisms of servant leadership’s effect on
followers’ work engagement: the social exchange mechanism (represented by leader-member exchange (LMX))
and the social learning mechanism (represented by public service motivation in Study 1 and prosocial motivation
in Study 2).
Design/methodology/approach – In Study 1, the authors collected two-wave matched data from 216
public sector employees. In Study 2, the authors collected two-wave matched data from 178 private sector
employees. The authors use hierarchical regression and bootstrapping to test the hypotheses.
Findings – Servant leadership is positively related to follower’s work engagement and this relationship is
mediated by LMX, but not by public service motivation (Study 1) or prosocial motivation (Study 2). It suggests
that servant leadership promotes followers’ work engagement mostly through the social exchange mechanism.
Research limitations/implications – The data were collected from Chinese employees, and future studies
are necessary to verify the findings in other cultural contexts.
Originality/value – This study sheds light on a more nuanced picture of the effect mechanisms of
servant leadership.
Keywords Servant leadership, Leader-member exchange, Public service motivation, Prosocial motivation,
Work engagement
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Servant leaders put followers’ interests before their own and act in a moral and humble
manner (van Dierendonck, 2011). Empirically, researchers reported that servant leadership is
related to various outcomes, such as job performance (e.g. Schwarz et al., 2016), organizational
commitment (e.g. Carter and Baghurst, 2014), helping (e.g. Neubert et al., 2008), organizational
citizenship behavior (e.g. Walumbwa et al., 2010) and engagement (e.g. Sousa and van
Dierendonck, 2017). We find engagement, as a positive job attitude (van Dierendonck, 2011), is
a relatively under studied but important outcome. Engaged workers display desirable
motivation and behaviors like vigor, dedication and absorption (Schaufeli et al., 2006). In this
paper, we investigate how servant leadership affects followers’ work engagement using one
sample from the public sector and another sample from the private sector.
Extant research has taken two directions to explain the effects of servant leadership. The
first proposed mediating mechanism is based on social exchange theory (Blau, 1964). Servant
leaders can form “social exchange relationships with their followers, rather than relying solely
on the economic incentives in the employment agreement or the authority vested in their
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by National Science Foundation of
China (Grant Nos 71772171 and 71372159), the project of “985” in China and the Social Sciences
planning projects from the Ministry of Education (Grant No. 17YJA630073). The three authors made
equal contribution to this paper. The order of author names is presented by the alphabetical order of
their family names.
positions” (Liden et al., 2008, p. 163). Social exchange involves at least an expectation of Servant
reciprocation, so that both parties will find the relationship rewarding and worthwhile to leadership and
continue (Blau, 1964). It is assumed that by helping the personal and professional growth of engagement
employees, a servant leader creates an obligation on followers to reciprocate in the long term,
and the target of the reciprocation is the leader or the organization represented by the leader.
Servant leadership researchers examined various mediators in the social exchange category,
including leader-member exchange (LMX; e.g. Newman et al., 2017), followers’ need satisfaction 407
(e.g. Chiniara and Bentein, 2016; van Dierendonck et al., 2014), commitment to the leader
(e.g. Walumbwa et al., 2010) and affective trust in the leader (e.g. Schaubroeck et al., 2011).
The second mediating mechanism is based on social learning theory (Bandura, 1977),
especially the vicarious learning process. Through the observation of positive, role modeling
behaviors by the servant leaders, followers will learn these behaviors and will seek to
replicate them in other social contexts, such as when interacting with the community, the
customers or the coworkers. It goes beyond the dyadic exchange relationship between
the leader and the follower, to benefit a broader range of stakeholders. It is consistent with
the tenet of servant leadership theory that servant leaders take into account multiple
stakeholders, including the larger society (Liden et al., 2008). In essence, through their
altruistic behaviors, servant leaders will be able to induce followers to mirror and become
servants themselves. There are only a few empirical studies examining the social learning
mechanism, and the key mediating variables examined include serving culture (e.g. Liden
et al., 2014) and service climate (Hunter et al., 2013) at the group level, and public service
motivation at the individual level (e.g. Schwarz et al., 2016).
These two perspectives imply very different and even contrasting processes, in that the first
is driven by self-interest and the second by altruism. Unfortunately, so far researchers
overlooked the theoretical difference, and to our knowledge, no study has examined the two
types of mediating mechanisms in the same research model side by side. We fill the gap by
testing the dual mediation model with one sample from the public sector, and another sample
from the private sector. This differential replication design (Lindsay and Ehrenberg, 1993) is
necessary to validate our results, because employees who self-selected into the public sector and
private sector may have different levels of altruistic motivation, and different work expectations.

Study 1
Servant leadership and work engagement
Servant leaders put the interests of the served before their own. It is these conscious choices
made by the servants that eventually made them leaders (Graham, 1991). Servant leaders
are moral, socially responsible and emphasize followers’ interests and developments (Parris,
2013; van Dierendonck, 2011; Avolio et al., 2009).
Work engagement is a positive and fulfilling job attitude (van Dierendonck, 2011). Engaged
workers display higher levels of vigor, dedication and absorption (Schaufeli et al., 2006). Vigor
means that an employee has a high level of energy and resilience at work; dedication means that
the employee has positive feelings at work such as significance, competence and personal
growth; and absorption means that the employee is so attached to, immersed in and concentrated
at work that he/she feels that time flies by and that it is hard to detach from work (Bakker et al.,
2014). Work engagement has been found to be further related to positive work attitudes,
individual well-being, extra role and helping behaviors, and performance (Christian et al., 2011;
Halbesleben, 2010). Scholars often use the job demands-resources ( JD-R) model to explain the
inducement of work engagement (Bakker and Demerouti, 2008; Bakker et al., 2014). According to
this model, all jobs are characterized by job demands and resources and work engagement is the
outcome of an individual’s psychological assessment and experiences related to those job
demands and resources (Bakker and Demerouti, 2008). So far, however, leadership has not been
considered a main job resource to induce engagement (Sousa and van Dierendonck, 2014).
JMP We propose that servant leadership could be a powerful organizational resource, in
33,6 buffering the negative effects of job demands and promoting followers’ engagement. From the
JD-R perspective, followers would have sufficient personal and social resources if their leaders
are competent, empowering, helping and sacrificing for them. Also, if the followers believe that
what they are doing is ethically and morally correct and beneficial to the community and the
larger society, they would have positive internal assessment and elevated self-esteem
408 (Chen et al., 2015), which are job resources that can induce work engagement (Xanthopoulou
et al., 2009). Recently, Petrou et al. (2012) applied the JD-R model to study employees’ daily
interactions with the environment and they found that direct supervisors play an important
role in employees’ evaluation of the job. Being a “significant other,” the direct supervisor’s
attitudes and behaviors are a very important channel for followers to construct their perception
of job sources and demands. Thus, when receiving servant leaders’ help and guidance, we
expect followers to feel psychologically empowered and meaningful. These positive feelings
are in the “positive circle” of the JD-R model that can promote followers’ work engagement
(Bakker, 2015). There are some initial evidence on the relationship between servant leadership
and engagement among employees in Europe (van Dierendonck et al., 2014; Sousa and van
Dierendonck, 2017). Based on the above rationale, we hypothesized the following:
H1. Servant leadership is positively related to work engagement.

The social exchange mechanism: LMX

Servant leadership is a leadership approach in which “leaders set aside their self-interest
and altruistically work for the benefit of their followers, and the communities” (Newman
et al., 2017, p. 49), while LMX measures the overall quality of the social exchange process
between leaders and followers, making it a core concept in relationship-based leadership
(Graen and Uhl-Bien, 1995). Both servant leadership and LMX emphasize attention to
followers’ needs, but focusing primarily on the relationship quality, “LMX theory is silent
with respect to the provision of personal healing, the development of followers into servant
leaders, and the encouragement of service to the community” (Liden et al., 2008, p. 163).
Leaders and followers form relationships based on their interactions in the past (Graen and
Uhl-Bien, 1995; Liden et al., 1997), thus LMX can be perceived as a consequence of servant
leadership. Followers of a servant leader will enjoy more opportunities and controls at work
and grow faster, thus develop higher quality of relationships with the leader.
According to social exchange theory, one tends to reciprocate received favors, in hope to
receive more benefits from future social exchanges. To maintain a balanced and equitable
social exchange with their leader, followers must be emotionally close to the servant leaders
(i.e. high LMX), and at the same time reciprocate with positive job attitudes and behaviors to
satisfy the leader and the organization the leader represents. Work engagement is a clear
signal to the leader that the follower is energetic in performing his or her assigned work, thus
a desirable response to servant leadership. Empirical research shows that servant leadership
is related to LMX among employees in China (Newman et al., 2017) and USA (Liden et al.,
2008), and that LMX is related to police officers’ work engagement in Netherland (Breevaart
et al., 2015). Based on the above rationale and evidence, we hypothesized the following:
H2. LMX mediates the relationship between servant leadership and work engagement.

The social learning mechanism: public service motivation

Social learning perspective offers a different view of the mediating mechanism. Social learning
theory (Bandura, 1977) posits that individuals can learn vicariously through observing and
imitating others. Servant leaders provide good role models for the followers by altruistically
helping followers and the community, thus their altruistic behaviors are likely to be replicated
by the followers when they interact with other stakeholders such as coworkers, customers, or Servant
the larger society. Such role-modeling effects are in line with servant leadership theory. In fact, leadership and
Greenleaf (1977) indicated that the best test of a servant leader is whether his or her followers engagement
will become servants themselves. In a similar vein, Liden et al. (2008) argued that servant
leaders prepare the organization and its members to contribute to the larger society. One
study has shown that “servant leaders ignite a cycle of service by role-modeling servant
behavior that is then mirrored through coworker helping behavior and high-quality customer 409
service” (Hunter et al., 2013, p. 316). Interestingly, this purported effect of servant leadership
on individual’s altruistic motivation is rarely tested (an exception is Schwarz et al., 2016), and
its relative effect to the social exchange mechanism is not clear.
We designed two studies to compare the relative effects of the social exchange mechanism
and the social learning mechanism. In Study 1 involving public sector employees, we use LMX
as a proxy for former mechanism and public service motivation as a proxy for the latter.
Public service motivation is an important and frequently studied construct in studies of public
employees, referring to “a general altruistic motivation to serve the interests of a community
of people, a state, a nation, or humankind” (Rainey and Steinbauer, 1999, p. 23). Its intended
beneficiaries go beyond the leader and the organization. Employees with high public service
motivation are altruistic and do not expect reciprocity from the recipients of their services,
making it clearly different from the social exchange perspective. A servant leader who puts
the interest of the employees, the community and the public above his or her own would be a
good role model and help enhance followers’ public service motivation. With higher public
service motivation, followers are likely to feel dedicated and resilient at work, and stay
engaged in their work despite the work-related stress:
H3a. Public service motivation mediates the relationship between servant leadership
and work engagement.
The proposed dual mediation hypotheses are depicted in Figure 1.

Method
Sample and procedure. We asked 40 public employees enrolled in a part-time Master’s of
Public Administration degree program at a public university in China to invite ten of their
colleagues to participate in the survey. We send links to the online survey to their personal
e-mail addresses and we assure the confidentiality. Immediate supervisors’ servant
leadership and respondents’ demographic information were measured in the first round of
the survey, which was conducted at the end of 2015. Two months later, we measured LMX,
public service motivation, and work engagement. We offered 50 Chinese yuan
(approximately $7.4) to the respondents who complete both rounds of survey. Among the
400 contacted public employees, 283 responded in the first round, and 223 responded in the
second round, yielding a response rate of 56.5 percent. We used 216 responses for final
analysis due to missing data. Among the 216 respondents, 103 (47.7 percent) were female,

LMX

Servant Leadership Work Engagement

PSM/PM Figure 1.
Theoretical model of
servant leadership
Notes: LMX, leader-member exchange; PSM, public service motivation; PM, prosocial and work engagement
motivation
JMP the average age was 32.22 (SD ¼ 6.52), 12 had a junior college degree (5.6 percent), 136 had a
33,6 bachelor degree (63 percent), 63 had a master’s degree (29.2 percent), and 5 had received
their doctorate degree (2.3 percent). The average tenure with their direct supervisor was
2.56 years (SD ¼ 2.57).
Measures. We used established scales published in English journals, and translated them
to Chinese using a standard back-translation approach (Brislin, 1970).
410 Servant leadership. We used seven items from Liden et al. (2015) to measure servant
leadership. It was a seven-point Likert-scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7
(strongly agree). A sample item was “My leader can tell if something work-related is going
wrong.” The Cronbach’s α for this scale is 0.88.
LMX. We used seven items from Graen and Uhl-Bien (1995) seven-point Likert-scale
ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) to measure LMX. A sample item is
“My supervisor recognizes my potential very well.” The Cronbach’s α for this scale is 0.85.
Public service motivation. We used a sixteen-item scale from Kim et al. (2013) to measure
public service motivation. It was on a five-point Likert-scale ranging from 1 (strongly
disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). A sample item was “I am prepared to make sacrifices for the
good of society.” The Cronbach’s α for this scale is 0.91.
Work engagement. We used the nine-item version of the Utrecht Work Engagement
Scale (Schaufeli et al., 2002). It was on a seven-point Likert-scale, ranging from 0 (never) to 6
(everyday). A sample item is “At my work, I feel bursting with energy.” The Cronbach’s α
for this scale is 0.93.
Control variables. Respondents’ gender (0 ¼ female, 1 ¼ male), age (in years) and educational
level (1 ¼ junior college, 2 ¼ bachelor’s, 3 ¼ master’s, 4 ¼ doctorate), and dyadic tenure with
the leader (in years) were included as controls because of their potential relationships with
outcome variable.

Results
Descriptive statistics. The means, standard deviations and inter-correlations among the
variables are reported in Table I. Servant leadership is positively related to LMX (r ¼ 0.37,
p o0.01), and work engagement (r ¼ 0.28, p o0.01). LMX is positively related to public
service motivation (r ¼ 0.23, p o0.01) and work engagement (r ¼ 0.42, p o0.01). Public
service motivation is positively related to work engagement (r ¼ 0.21, p o0.01).
Hypothesis testing. As can be seen from Table II, servant leadership is positively related
to work engagement ( β ¼ 0.30, p o0.001, Model 6) after taking into the effects of control
variables. H1 is supported.
H2 and H3 predicted that LMX and public service motivation will each mediate the
relationship between servant leadership and work engagement. As can be seen from

Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1. Gender 0.52 0.50

2. Age 32.22 6.35 0.03
3. Education – – 0.05 0.00
4. Tenure with leader 2.56 2.57 −0.06 0.33** 0.14*
5. Servant leadership 3.57 0.87 0.13 −0.11 −0.01 −0.16* (0.88)
Table I.
6. LMX 4.95 1.00 0.18* 0.07 0.07 −0.09 0.37** (0.85)
Means, standard
deviations and 7. PSM 4.43 0.48 0.00 0.11 −0.16* 0.01 0.10 0.23** (0.91)
correlations among 8. Work engagement 3.50 1.02 0.05 0.20** 0.04 −0.01 0.28** 0.42** 0.21** (0.93)
examined variables Notes: n ¼ 216. LMX, leader member exchange; PSM, public service motivation. Cronbach’s αs were reported
for Study 1 in parentheses. For gender, 0 ¼ female, 1 ¼ male. *p o0.05; **p o0.01
 LMX PSM Work engagement
Servant
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Model 7 leadership and
engagement
Step 1: control variables
Gender 0.16* 0.12 0.01 −0.01 0.03 −0.00 −0.04
Age 0.10 0.13 0.11 0.12 0.23** 0.25** 0.20**
Education 0.07 0.07 −0.16* −0.16* 0.05 0.05 0.04
Tenure with leader −0.12**** −0.08 −0.00 0.01 −0.10 −0.06 −0.03 411
Step 2: main effect
Servant leadership 0.36*** 0.11 0.30*** 0.17**
Step 3: mediating variables
LMX 0.32***
PSM 0.11****
Overall F 2.78* 8.82*** 2.00**** 2.12**** 2.75* 6.55*** 9.53***
R2 0.05 0.17 0.04 0.05 0.05 0.14 0.24 Table II.
▵F 31.37*** 2.54 20.73*** 14.82*** Hierarchical
▵R 2
0.12 0.01 0.09 0.11 regression results for
Notes: n ¼ 216. Standardized coefficients are reported. *p o0.05; **po 0.01; ***po 0.001; ****p o0.1 mediation for Study 1

Table II, servant leadership is positively related to LMX ( β ¼ 0.36, p o0.001, Model 2), but
not public service motivation ( β ¼ 0.11, pW0.05, Model 4). In Model 7, controlling for
servant leadership, LMX was significantly related to engagement ( β ¼ 0.32, p o0.001) while
public service motivation was marginally related with engagement ( β ¼ 0.11, p o0.1) and
the effect of servant leadership on engagement was still significant ( β ¼ 0.17, p o0.05). The
total indirect effect of servant leadership on engagement was 0.148 (95% CI ¼ [0.085, 0.250]).
The indirect effect through LMX was 0.134 (95% CI ¼ [0.071, 0.233]) and significant,
supporting H2. The indirect effect through public service motivation was 0.014 (95%
CI ¼ [−0.004, 0.050]) and insignificant. H3a was not supported.

Study 2
A limitation of Study 1 is that employees who self-select into the public sector may have
higher altruistic tendency compared to other working populations, and serving the public is
part of their job requirements instead of a discretionary choice. This range restriction in
their public service motivation may be an alternative cause for the insignificant mediation
effect. We performed a differential replication (Lindsay and Ehrenberg, 1993) with a second
sample from the private sector to validate our findings. Although the majority of the
research design remained the same for Study 2, we choose to replace the scale of public
service motivation, because its wording was designed for the public sector. We use a more
general construct, prosocial motivation, as the proxy of the social learning mechanism.
Grant (2008, p. 49) defined prosocial motivation as “the desire to expend effort to benefit
other people.” Given the similarity between the public service motivation and prosocial
motivation concepts, some researchers treated the two interchangeably (e.g. Wright and
Grant, 2010), while others view public service motivation as a particular form of prosocial
motivation “that is animated by specific dispositions and values arising from public
institutions and missions” (Perry et al., 2010, p. 682).
Many studies on servant leadership are actually based on leader samples from the private
sector (e.g. Hunter et al., 2013; Liden et al., 2008). We expect the social learning mechanism of
servant leadership will take place in the private sector as well. Through direct observations
and interactions, followers of servant leaders will admire their leaders as role models, and
become motivated to emulate them to serve a broad range of others such as coworkers,
JMP customers, the community and the society. With a strong prosocial motivation, they will be
33,6 ready to overcome challenges and feel energized, dedicated and engaged in doing their work:
H3b. Prosocial motivation mediates the relationship between servant leadership and
work engagement.
Method
412 Sample and procedure. We asked 40 part-time graduate students from the same university as
Study 1 who are working in the private sector to each invite ten colleagues or friends working
in the private sector to participate in an online survey. Anonymity and confidentiality were
assured again. The first round of data collection was in the middle of 2018, and we asked the
respondents to report their immediate supervisors’ servant leadership and demographic
information. Two weeks later, we measured LMX, prosocial motivation and work engagement.
We offered 30 Chinese yuan (approximately $4.5) to compensate respondents who complete
both rounds of survey. Among the 400 contacted private employees, 305 responded in the first
round, and 202 responded in the second round, yielding a response rate of 50.5 percent.
We used 178 responses for final analysis due to missing data. Among them, 104 (58.4 percent)
were female, the average age was 32.61 (SD ¼ 6.24), 27 had a junior college degree
(15.2 percent), 93 had a bachelor degree (52.2 percent), 49 had a master’s degree (27.5 percent)
and 6 had received their doctorate degree (3.4 percent), while 3 reported other degrees.
The average tenure with their direct supervisor was 2.90 years (SD ¼ 3.57).
Measures. Servant leadership, LMX and work engagement were measured with the same
scales and anchors as Study 1. We measured prosocial motivation with four items from
Grant (2008). A sample item is “It is important for me to do good for other through my
work.” As shown in Table III, the Cronbach’s αs of variables in our research model varied
between 0.84 and 0.93. We used the same set of control variables as in Study 1.

Results
Descriptive statistics. The means, standard deviations and inter-correlations among the
variables are reported in Table III.
Hypothesis testing. As can be seen from Table IV, servant leadership is positively related
to work engagement ( β ¼ 0.28, p o0.001, Model 6) after taking into the effects of control
variables. H1 is supported.
Also can be seen from Table IV, servant leadership is positively related to LMX
( β ¼ 0.58, p o0.001, Model 2), but not prosocial motivation ( β ¼ 0.07, p W0.05, Model 4).
In Model 7, controlling for servant leadership, LMX ( β ¼ 0.29, p o0.001) and prosocial
motivation ( β ¼ 0.34, p o0.001) were significantly related to engagement, while the effect of
servant leadership on engagement was no longer significant ( β ¼ 0.09, p W0.05). The total

Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1. Gender 0.42 0.49

2. Age 32.61 6.23 −0.02
3. Education – – 0.02 −0.01
4. Tenure with leader 2.90 3.57 0.05 0.37** −0.07
5. Servant leadership 3.23 0.78 −0.02 −0.12 0.13 −0.08 (0.84)
Table III.
6. LMX 4.67 1.01 0.05 0.07 0.00 0.06 0.56** (0.91)
Means, standard
deviations and 7. Prosocial motivation 4.13 0.56 −0.07 0.08 0.07 0.03 0.07 0.16* (0.86)
correlations among 8. Work engagement 3.43 0.95 −0.01 0.15 −0.05 −0.10 0.25** 0.39** 0.39** (0.93)
examined variables Notes: n ¼ 178. LMX, leader member exchange. Cronbach’s αs were reported in parentheses. For gender,
for Study 2 0 ¼ female, 1 ¼ male. *p o 0.05; **po 0.01
 LMX Prosocial motivation Work engagement
Servant
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Model 7 leadership and
engagement
Step 1: control variables
Gender 0.05 0.07 −0.07 −0.07 0.00 0.01 0.01
Age 0.06 0.13**** 0.08 0.08 0.21** 0.24** 0.18*
Education 0.01 −0.07 0.08 0.07 −0.06 −0.09 −0.10
Tenure with leader 0.04 0.05 0.01 0.01 −0.18 −0.18* −0.20** 413
Step 2: main effect
Servant leadership 0.58*** 0.07 0.28*** 0.09
Step 3: mediating variables
LMX 0.29***
Prosocial motivation 0.34***
Overall F 0.43 17.71*** 0.74 0.76 2.34**** 5.04*** 11.22***
R2 0.01 0.34 0.02 0.02 0.05 0.13 0.32 Table IV.
▵F 85.99*** 0.83 15.06*** 23.40*** Hierarchical
▵R 2
0.33 0.01 0.08 0.19 regression results for
Notes: n ¼ 178. Standardized coefficients are reported. *p o0.05; **po 0.01; ***po 0.001; ****p o0.1 mediation for Study 2

indirect effect of servant leadership on engagement was 0.233 (95% CI ¼ [0.048, 0.425]).
The indirect effect through LMX was 0.204 (95% CI ¼ [0.039, 0.388]) and significant,
supporting H2. The indirect effect through prosocial motivation was 0.029 (95%
CI ¼ [−0.040, 0.125]) and insignificant. H3b was not supported. In general, results from
Study 2 are consistent with our findings from Study 1.

Discussion
Servant leadership research is at its “early state of theoretical development” with many
unanswered questions (Liden et al., 2014, p. 1449). This study enriches servant leadership
literature by comparing the dual mediating mechanisms of servant leadership’s effect on
work engagement. These results have important theoretical and practical implications.

Theoretical implications
Servant leadership is often seen as a promising and “a stand-alone leadership approach that
is capable of helping leadership researchers and practitioners better explain a wide range of
outcomes” (Hoch et al., 2018, p. 501). When it comes to the exact effect mechanism, a big
theoretical difference between the social exchange perspective and the social learning
perspective is that the exchange process involves expected reciprocation of favors between
parties, while the learning (or modeling) process involves serving a broader range of
stakeholders and the service is more altruistic in nature. Our study represents an early effort
to explicitly stress the theoretical difference and compare the relative magnitudes of each
mediation mechanism.
From our results, it seems servant leadership’s effect on work engagement is primarily
through the social exchange process, instead of through the social learning process. To be
specific, servant leadership is related to LMX only, but not significantly related to
employees’ public service motivation or prosocial motivation, even though LMX, public
service motivation and prosocial motivation are all related to engagement. It appears that
followers simply treat servant leadership as yet another well-intended leadership
style: followers will appreciate the inducement and favors from the leaders and feel
obligated to reciprocate with organizationally desired workplace behaviors. There is no
strong evidence to confirm followers’ motivation to emulate their servant leaders to serve
JMP others, which is assumed a strength and unique component of servant leadership theory
33,6 (Liden et al., 2008). This link is broken for both of our samples.
On surface, it seems counter-intuitive that employees enjoy developing a high-quality
exchange relationship with their servant leader, but they are not interested to imitate their
leaders to serve other stakeholders altruistically. However, the result may be attributed to the
larger cultural context. O’Reilly and Chatman (1986) specified that there are three forms of
414 interpersonal influence: compliance, affiliation and internalization. The highest and most
difficult-to-achieve level is internalization. Followers may admire certain attributes and
behaviors of their leader and feel proud of their affiliation with the leader (i.e. LMX), but they will
not adopt such attributes as their own if there is a lack of value congruence (p. 493). Chinese
culture, in general, is characterized by hierarchies and high power distance (Spencer-Oatey,
1997), where people tend to accept and even expect unequally distributed power. It is thus
difficult for followers to internalize the humility and altruism attributes of their servant leaders.
Followers may perceive servant leaders as a rare hero or exemplar at a high and distant level,
but remain skeptical whether they can or should replicate such servant behaviors, especially
when they feel they have limited resources inside and outside of the organization to sustain such
behaviors. Furthermore, the government plays a central role in Chinese society, so public
employees may see themselves as “officials” instead of true servants in front of the general
public. Even though they are very willing to reciprocate the service rendered by their leaders,
they may not feel comfortable delivering the same quality of service toward people they
“manage.” It may be unrealistic to assume the modeling process will take place naturally. Future
studies are needed to investigate what servant leaders can do to encourage followers emulate
their service behaviors, and investigate if the results remain the same in other cultural contexts.
We caution that it is premature to conclude the learning/modeling process is completely
not working, even in Chinese public sector. Schwarz et al. (2016) found that servant
leadership is related to public service motivation among a group of government employees
in Zhejiang, which is a wealthy province on the east coast of China, known for its booming
private enterprises (Ye and Wei, 2005). The important role of private economy may have
changed the local cultural norm and helped employees to accept equality and internalize the
values of servant leaders. Our sample was drawn from many places of China, thus a better
representation of typical Chinese employees’ values at the moment. However, as China gets
more globalized and market-economy-oriented, employees’ personal values will change too,
so we expect both the social exchange mechanism and the social learning mechanism
hypothesized in our study may be supported in future studies.

Practical implications
Our study has practical implications for managers. We found that servant leadership can help
produce engaged employees. Leaders can motivate by putting followers’ interests before their
own, by engaging in moral and ethical decision making, and by developing and mentoring
followers. Our study underlines the important role of social exchange in the servant
leadership’s influence. By building stronger LMX with employees, servant leaders can boost
the morale in the organization and increase employees’ dedication to work. We advocate
including service-orientation as an important criterion for leaders’ selection and promotion.
To help the social learning process, we encourage servant leaders making themselves
more visible to the employees and performing more frequent visits and communications
with followers including those who do not directly report to the leaders. By closing the
distance from employees, a leader makes it easier for employees to learn from and to
follow the leader. Another way is to assign servant leaders as mentors to junior leaders to
work on projects together, so that they can learn the complex decision-making process
when their servant leaders face a dilemma, instead of just the decision itself or the impact
of the decision.
Limitations and future directions Servant
This study should be considered in light of its limitations. In addition to the single cultural leadership and
context we mentioned above, we caution that our data were reported by followers only. engagement
We used time-lagged design to minimize common method variance. But in order to fully
address the direction of causality, it would be optimal to measure key variables at more time
points, from different data sources, and over a longer span. It will also help to use a less
obtrusive data collection method such as diary study (Bakker, 2015) to record followers’ 415
perceptions of servant leadership and subsequent reactions.

Conclusion
We found that servant leadership is an antecedent of work engagement, and this effect is
primarily through the social exchange process, while the social learning process is relatively
difficult to take place. In practical terms, our study shows how important it is to use servant
leadership to build strong relationships with employees and boost their work motivation.

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About the authors

Yuanjie Bao is Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin
University, China. His research interests include leadership, values and person-environment fit.
His work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Advanced Nursing and Cross Cultural
Management: An International Journal.
Chaoping Li is Professor in the School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University,
China. His research interests include leadership, personality and work engagement. His work has
appeared in journals such as Journal of Business Research, Management and Organization Review and
Human Resource Management. Chaoping Li is the corresponding author and can be contacted at:
lichaoping@ruc.edu.cn
Hao Zhao is Associate Professor in Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
His research interests include entrepreneurship, recruitment, leadership and employee creativity. His
work has been published in leading academic journals including Journal of Applied Psychology,
Personnel Psychology, Journal of Management, Leadership Quarterly and Journal of Business Venturing.

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